Cinema: The New Pictures, Oct. 12, 1953

Torch Song (MGM) should make a lot of Joan Crawford’s fans uncomfortable. Joan is miscast as a belligerent musi-comedy star who wears her heart on her fist; the fist is directed mainly at Michael Wilding. Fortunately, the camera decides most of the time that it is more fun to look at Actress Crawford’s remarkable legs. Even this is an obvious mistake, for by reducing a performer of Joan’s experience and hard-won skills to the cheesecake class, the picture stints her of the human qualities she has developed. Best scene: one in which Marjorie Rambeau, as Joan’s mother, a merry old frump, hands around some free advice to her lovelorn daughter, and then amalgamates a ten-oz. glass of beer in one unforgettable chugalug.

The Captain’s Paradise (London Films; Lopert) is a wonderfully funny little immorality play about how the Old Adam tries once again to have his apple and eat it too. The Adam in this instance is a middle-class Englishman who looks as safe as porridge—until the moviegoer looks again and sees that the part is being played by Alec Guinness, who, in recent films (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Promoter), has been hilariously demonstrating that the dullest-seeming people may be the most fascinating monsters.

This time, Guinness plays the captain of a ferry steamer plying between Gibraltar and Morocco. A quite ordinary fellow to all appearances, he is what might be described as a commuting bigamist.

On the Gibraltar side, the captain goes soberly afoot from his ship to a conventional middle-class cottage. There he is cozily greeted by wife No. i, a plain but devoted homebody (Celia Johnson) who puts out his pipe and porter, serves up his favorite dumplings, and answers dutifully to his call for “beddy-byes” at 10 p.m. Otherwise, as the captain explains, he would be “no use on the bridge.”

On the African side, the captain quick-changes into dove-grey flannels and a snap-brim felt, darts to a waiting taxi and heads, by way of the flower shop, for a glassily sinful flat in one of the tonier hotels. There he is passionately greeted by wife No. 2, a sexy, black-haired baggage (Yvonne de Carlo) who throws the cootch around in nightclubs, guzzles champagne, and takes moonlight plunges in the Mediterranean.

So it goes for years, with nobody the wiser. One night with one wife, one with the other. “Two women,” as the captain congratulates himself, “each with half of the things a man wants.” It’s all too good to last, of course—so good that it is worth the price of admission to find out what goes wrong.

As the captain, Actor Guinness is consistently at the height of his own special comedy style. Appearing to be acting not at all, he creates a sort of emotional vacuum at the center of his role into which the spectator’s feelings are drawn. Guinness always waits that extra moment until his audience sees what obviously must be done, and then he does it, almost as if he were taking direction from his public. It is a remarkably effective technique, and never more so than when he unexpectedly crosses the audience up.

As the first wife, Celia (Brief Encounter) Johnson is comfy mediocrity to the life; she is an impeccable actress who finds the center of human dignity in every role she plays, and from it moves out into comedy or tragedy with equal ease and grace. As wife No. 2, Yvonne de Carlo does the job of her life. For the first time a director (Anthony Kimmins) has understood that her exuberant wiggles, suggestive ogles and painted sneer of sexual overconfidence need only the least exaggeration to change a glamour girl into a raucously earthy figure of fun.

Mogambo (MGM) is jampacked with Technicolor shots of such splendid animals as lions, leopards, gazelles and Ava Gardner. The curator of this photogenic zoo is Clark Gable, pictured as a tough, conscienceless “white hunter” who suffers a predictable attack of morality as the movie ends. Filmed in Africa, Mogambo borrowed its plot from the 21-year-old Red Dust (which also starred Gable, with the late Jean Harlow playing the Ava Gardner role). The dialogue seems to date back to an even earlier era than the original film.

Actress Gardner, cast as a sort of one-girl Friendship Club, arrives at Gable’s African animal farm to keep a date with a maharaja. When she finds that her potentate has gone back to the Punjab, Ava companionably moves in with Gable, only to have her idyl interrupted by the arrival of a British anthropologist (Donald Sinden) and his aristocratic, susceptible wife (Grace Kelly). On safari, the camera keeps one travelogue eye on natives, chest-thumping gorillas and the lush African landscape, but concentrates mainly on a heavy-breathing triangle involving Ava, Gable and Grace. After 116 minutes, the characters are sorted out again so that Ava gets Gable and Actress Kelly, chastened and repentant, goes back to her simple-minded husband.

Gable plays his he-man part with the bemused ease to be expected of a man who has done the same thing many times before; Grace Kelly’s blonde beauty remains intact despite the remarkably silly lines she is made to say, and Ava romps delightfully with baby elephants and giraffes in the intervals between her pursuit of Gable.